Yesterday, I mentioned “viral” several times, but I then realized not every one may know that word.

Viral marketing is a term for any thing that you put on the web and then allow users to spread it for you. For that to happen though, the content has to be engaging and/or enigmatic. A good example of this would be the now infamous YouTube video known as “The Dramatic Chipmunk“.

While the creature in the video isn’t even a chipmunk (it’s a prairie dog), and it was originally part of a Japanese talk show, someone put the creatures head movement to music, and it took off like a rocket. The copy I linked you to has been viewed nearly 4 million times, and that’s not counting all the other times it has been uploaded. It has also been “remixed” to be James Bond, part of Kill Bill, and more. It has taken on a life of its own.

Knowing what will go viral is next to impossible, but when you hit on it, it ends up embedded in websites, on social bookmarking sites, social network pages and more. Humor seems to work the best, but forcing humor never goes well. The whole point is, if you can find that lucrative viral item to put on the web, and you even get your company name in it somehow, you’re talking millions upon millions of impressions.

Isn’t it worth at least a try?

It seems just about every one has a Flickr account nowadays, but the question is why don’t you?

It’s free, it’s indexed numerous places, and depending on your picture, it has the potential of going viral. If you are going to be putting up a MySpace profile, and you have pictures you want to post anyway, why not put them on Flickr? You need to upload them somewhere anyway, so you can kill two birds with one stone.

What type of pictures should you upload though? Show off your business, let people see events you’ve had, have an internal contest in your company that challenges your employees to do something creative (the best type of content for going viral) and then put the results on the account. The more pictures, the better, because with each picture, your odds of a potential customer/client of coming across it accidentally goes up.

And best of all, it costs you nothing. Have you noticed how much social marketing really costs you nothing but a little time?

I’ve said numerous times now that you should do as much social networking as you can, but even I think there are limits to this. When I stumbled across Mashable’s list of 350+ social networks, I was then sure there are limits.

With the number of networks out there it can be a bit overwhelming to the novice. The best idea is to stick to the big names when you start out with sites such as MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and so on. As time goes on, as you find sites that are more tailored to your area of work or service, then you can drill to the narrower networks that have more focus.

Start wide, then focus, it’s not costing you anything, in theory, so you have the room to experiment.

A little while back I talked about what social bookmarking is and how to write content worthy of social bookmarking.

Another key is you have to make it easily accessible to the readers. And it’s not just on blogs either, you can add social bookmarking links to just about anything. You just have to make sure the buttons are easy to find, don’t make your users work for it. While most people point to Digg as the the king, which it is, it’s lifespan of being helpful is very short lived. The master of longevity is probably StumbleUpon. I have seen posts that seemed dead to me, get Stumbled by someone 2 months later and bring in another 40 – 50 new, unique visitors to one of my sites.

That’s 40 – 50 people who were new, probably never heard of me, and I got that traffic because it was Stumbled. And all because I made it easy to be Stumbled by including a link. You can’t beat “free” marketing like that when it happens organically.

Considering how much we talk about social marketing, I am sure there are a few of you out there that still wonder why you need it. Why would anyone go this route compared to traditional advertising?

One needs to look no further than the the upcoming Presidential election to know why.

John Edwards was the first to go on the MySpace Presidential Dialogue site, and next will be Barack Obama. If social marketing is good enough for men running for President of the United States, don’t you think it’s good enough for you also?